I have never been particularly good with directions, which is how I found myself standing in a cow field three miles from Insko convinced I was at the front door of our holiday let. The sat nav had given up somewhere near Szczecin, my phone was pretending to be a brick, and I had just enthusiastically waved at a man on a tractor who looked at me with the sort of pity usually reserved for people trying to parallel park a canal boat. Still, the Pomeranian countryside was undeniably pretty, even when viewed from between two slightly judgmental Friesians.

The actual property, when I finally stumbled upon it, sat tucked down a lane I had driven past twice. A converted farmhouse with a proper red-tiled roof and a garden that looked like someone had actually cared about it, which in my experience of self-catering places is rarer than you might hope. My partner was already there, having sensibly taken the train to Szczecin and a taxi the rest of the way. She opened the door holding a mug of something herbal and said nothing at all, which spoke volumes.

What struck me first was the silence. Not the uncomfortable kind, but the sort that makes you realise how much noise you normally live with. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, which only emphasised how little else was happening. The house smelled of wood polish and something faintly smoky from the fireplace, and through the kitchen window I could see a stretch of meadow that seemed to go on until it simply got bored and became sky.

We had planned to visit Insko proper the next morning, but instead found ourselves wandering down a track behind the property that looked unofficial enough to be interesting. This became the pattern of the week. The planned trips to the lake, the museum, the recommended fish restaurant, all gave way to whatever we happened across while being gloriously, deliberately lost. A clearing where someone had left a rusting Soviet-era tractor now colonised by foxgloves. A pond where an elderly man was fishing with a patience I found almost offensive, who nodded at us as though strangers appearing from the woods was perfectly routine.

The best discovery came on our third day, when a wrong turning on what I maintain was a deliberately misleading footpath led us to a tiny chapel, barely more than a shed with aspirations, its wooden walls silvered by decades of Pomeranian weather. Inside, someone had left fresh wildflowers in a jar. There was no sign, no information board, no gift shop. Just a place that existed because someone had once cared enough to build it, and someone else still cared enough to tend it. I found myself unexpectedly moved by this, standing in my still slightly muddy walking boots, wondering how many other small kindnesses I had marched past in my usual hurry to be somewhere official.

By the end of the week I had stopped checking maps entirely, which is of course when I finally found the proper path down to Insko Lake, a stretch of water so calm it seemed almost smug about it. We sat on a bench that may or may not have been public property and watched a heron perform its slow, deliberate hunting routine. My partner observed that I seemed different. More relaxed, she meant, though she phrased it as "less annoying," which I chose to take as affectionate.

The mishap of my arrival had set the tone without me realising it. Getting lost, it turned out, was not the interruption to the holiday but the whole point of it. The Pomeranian countryside does not reward efficiency. It rewards the wandering, the wondering, the willingness to follow a track simply because it looks like it might go somewhere interesting. I returned home with mud on my boots, no photographs of famous landmarks, and a stubborn conviction that the best thing I did all week was wave at that tractor driver, who probably still tells people about the idiot in the cow field.